


Some Years Down the Road

by telm_393



Category: The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Caretaking, Catatonia, Codependency, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-05 14:16:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18830362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Pete and Ray get their happily ever after.No, really.





	Some Years Down the Road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnnetheCatDetective](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/gifts).



> There's some homophobia, mild sex talk, and minor violence, all of it canon-typical.
> 
> I'm so glad I read this book, and I hope you enjoy the fic!

Stebbins said, “You know what? Do something different.”

And with that, he stopped moving.

Pete’s mind, turned to mush in his skull, could not even tell if Stebbins was talking to him, and definitely couldn’t parse what he meant. But Garraty could. Somehow, Garraty could, because he grabbed Pete’s arm and, with strength he couldn’t possibly have had, hauled him along, though the crowds shrieked in confusion. And they ran.

Stebbins, for his part, lay down and died. Pete heard a gunshot, but didn’t look back, stumbling along with Garraty until they stopped as well. Pete didn’t mind. Just before Stebbins had made his utterly inscrutable decision, Pete had been ready to sit down, and that's how he would've died. He was all right dying with Garraty instead. He even preferred it.

Garraty wrapped his arms around Pete and said, with a conviction that Pete could feel, “Let’s both win.”

It was impossible.

There had never been two winners in all the history of the Walk, and Pete knew that it wasn't going to happen just all of a sudden.

But when Garraty slung his arms around Pete and held on tight, Pete held on right back. And when they sank to their knees together, the shots didn’t come, even once they were long past getting warnings and should've already gotten dead.

Maybe it was the crowd. Pete couldn’t hear them, not really, couldn’t make out any words, but maybe they weren’t cheering for blood, but for something new. Two winners. _And now for something completely different…_

No.

There would be no winners at all, Pete thought, and so he transferred all of his attention to the boy in his arms. He held tight to Garraty—to Ray, who had wrapped himself around Pete so completely that if the soldiers shot one of them they would shoot the other. They were breaking the rules, but Pete didn’t give a damn about the rules, and couldn’t remember if he ever had.

The soldiers kept not shooting, minute after minute passing by.

All Pete could hear was cheering in the background and Ray’s voice saying, “Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die, I can’t do this alone. I can’t do this without anyone. I can’t do this without you.”

Ray’s voice was cracked, vulnerable, disappearing. Pete began to cry.

He couldn’t imagine doing this—whatever this was, and it was probably dying—alone either. Pete felt like Ray was the most important person in the world, and leaving him seemed like an impossible proposition. He didn’t know when he had started feeling like that about Ray, or why, but he did. It was almost like how he’d felt for Pris a million years ago, but stronger, not just intoxicating but intoxicating to an extent that he knew he’d never be sober again. 

Pete held on tight to Ray and planned to hold on forever, all the way into eternity. He imagined what it would look like, bullets going through both their skulls, brain matter mixing together.

 _How romantic,_ he thought hysterically, and he laughed through his tears, because he couldn't quite pinpoint why he was thinking of romance at all, and would never have the time to figure it out. Pete McVries was only seventeen years old, and had learned most of what he knew about life at the very end of it, looking for redemption in a senseless game.

He wasn’t looking to win anymore. He was looking to not be alone again. _I’d treat you better,_ he wanted to tell Ray. _I’d’ve treated you better._

None of it made any sense.

The cheers got louder, so loud that they seeped into his consciousness. He could hear his name, and he could hear Ray’s. The crowd was cheering for them both, or maybe not. Pete didn’t know if he was imagining things. 

He kept holding on.

He could hear a car rolling out behind him. He didn’t move, not even when he heard a voice that was almost familiar. It was the voice of the Devil. The voice was making an announcement that Pete did not hear, and then the voice was part of a body attached to a hand on Pete’s arm, and the Major told him, “Congratulations.”

Pete looked up over Ray's shoulder. It wasn’t taking a chance exactly, because there were no chances left to take. He gave himself over to fate. If he died, then he died, and if there was a next life after all, he would meet Ray there, and if there wasn’t, he would finally rest.

The Major was in front of him, standing there like a mirage. Maybe he was one. Maybe Pete was already dead, and this was Hell with a dash of Heaven, holding Ray Garraty in front of crowds of vultures going wild.

Pete stood up, untangling himself from Ray, and Ray just leaned against Pete’s leg. At some point he’d stopped saying anything.

Pete hoped that if someone died, it’d be him, because he couldn’t fathom life without Ray, the boy whose life he’d saved and who’d saved his life, for what it was worth, for whatever length of time.

When he looked down at Ray, because somehow Pete was still standing, and standing still for the first time in ages, he felt an excruciating pang, because Ray’s eyes were different, just like that, from one moment to the next.

They were not dead but haunted, empty and fathomless and Pete wondered if his eyes looked the same. Ray’s eyes had been fearful, desperate, the look of a man ready to run, the look of a man ready to run hauling another boy along out of obligation or love, and all of a sudden they looked like the kind of eyes that wouldn’t look like that ever again.

Pete thought, _oh, no, don’t you dare die on me,_ and he thought, _don’t you think I’ll give up on you._ He thought it like a promise and a threat at the same time.

It made no sense to think it, while he looked at the Major and waited to die, but he did.

The Major smiled, and Pete wanted to put a bullet in his head, wanted to spend the rest of his life putting a bullet in the Major’s head.

The Major said, “Congratulations. Two boys winning in such a display of teamwork—you are truly the pride of our country.”

Pete, not registering the words, said, “If you kill one of us, kill me, but someone needs to take care of him. That’s what I want for the Prize. I just want to be able to take care of the people who deserve it.”

The Major, looking amicably baffled as if this was a concession he’d ever made before, as if this was precedented, said, “No one is going to die today.”

Pete thought that was the funniest fucking thing he’d ever heard in his life.

But he did not die that day, and neither did Ray.

They won. Together, they won.

+

Winning was both the most special thing in the world and nothing special at all, because no matter the Prize, no matter the cash, the Long Walk never really ended.

+

They got a cabin in Maine with some of the money, a little outside of Oldtown, nearish to Ray’s mom’s place. Pete’s parents and sister moved into the same town quietly, and became fast friends with Ray’s mother and her special friend as they grieved their sons, all of them set for life.

They sent money to Scramm’s wife, too, his wife and his baby, a boy like he’d wanted, carrying on that ridiculous name. Or Pete sent the money. But he knew that Ray would too, if he was around, and he was around, because when Pete mentioned sending the money, he swore he could see Ray smile. That was in the early days, after Ray went inside of himself and didn’t come out, just like the boys on the Walk who’d disappeared into their own minds, putting one foot in front of the other until they couldn’t. The only difference was that Ray put one foot in front of the other until he couldn’t, and then he survived.

A husk of himself, Ray’s girlfriend—ex-girlfriend, Pete supposed, and he wasn’t sorry, though he wondered if Ray himself was—said.

Pete didn’t go out much. It was awkward when he did. Everyone stared at him. Before the Walk, he’d always felt self-conscious about it because he knew it was the scar on his face that people were looking at, the shame he was always wearing, a scarlet letter in the form of an ugly white mark.

After the Walk, he felt even worse, bad enough that he wasn’t able to hide it, taking to hunching his shoulders and looking down at his feet, because he knew they were staring at the scars on his soul. 

Ray, Maine’s own, didn’t go out at all, only wandered around the cabin without seeming to understand what he was doing, rounding the corners as if taking laps, over four miles an hour. He didn’t run. Pete had been afraid he’d run, but there wasn’t enough space to run in the cabin and...

Ray didn’t go out, which was the only reason Pete did. He felt that someone had to represent the triumphant winners--plural, that's right--of the Long Walk, someone had to be out there saying “Ray Garraty’s still alive and don’t you forget it, and also Peter McVries is around too.” Someone had to buy the exact brand of soup and the exact brand of white chocolate that Ray liked. Ray’s mom, who stayed with him when Pete was out, tried to feed him, but only Pete could really do it. Ray tended to turn his face from most everyone else.

“Don’t you see your mother cry and cry?” Pete asked more than once when he and Ray were alone. “It’s tragic. You’re not the kind of man who ignores his own mother, are you?”

Pete was always good at getting a rise out of people. He talked too much—everyone was right about that—but Ray didn’t seem to mind, though he didn’t seem to mind much of anything. Still, he was most prone to showing flickers of emotion when Pete was around, flickers of the person he was both at the beginning and end of the Walk when he and Pete had met.

Pete was around most of the time, because he couldn’t bring himself to let go of the person Ray was, and he owed him. Sometimes he thought that, hell, the reason  _he_ hadn’t curled up on the floor of his own broken mind and disappeared right into himself was because Ray had done it first.

Every once in a while, when he helped Ray wash up or shaved Ray’s face, neither of them much for beards anymore, Pete felt a spark of arousal that made him sick, because Ray didn’t owe him anymore, and Pete hadn't had a right to him in the first place, but there was a reason Parker had suspected that they were queer, and it was because there was something between them, something special. Everyone in town thought they were queer too, and so did their families, but even Ray’s mother was silent on it, just as Ray was silent on it. Maybe he didn’t care anymore.

Still, Pete didn’t touch him, not like that, because the idea of Ray looking at him and saying _why’d you hurt me?_ made him feel like a piece of shit, and he had this faint, secret thought that someday they’d get there, wherever there was, and Pete had learned how to wait.

And he had to wait, because Ray wasn’t himself, though Pete wasn’t either, which made Pete think that he wasn’t being accurate. They weren’t themselves, but it wasn't like they could wait to go back to the people they used to be.

They were new versions of themselves. Better versions? No. But they were new.

He floated the idea to Ray one night when they were at the kitchen table and Ray’s eyes were thousand yard staring into dreams that Pete hoped, probably against hope, weren’t nightmares like the ones Pete had and saw when he half dozed off during the day. “I guess,” he announced, “this is who we are now.”

When he noticed a flash of panic in Ray’s eyes, he corrected himself somewhat. “Not that we have to be like this forever. If we changed so much just from a few days walking, we can change again, right? Years after the fact, I have a hard time believing you’ll still be over here staring into space and I’ll be spending every waking moment wondering when it is I’ll get my ticket, seeing our fine companions like mirages." Like a man dreaming up an oasis in the desert. "No, you’ll be talking to me again, because I know that’s already what you’re doing in your head. Don’t think I don’t see it, the way you come back to yourself when I talk to you. Sometimes. You’re not gone. I know it.”

Ray said nothing, which Pete expected but still found mildly disappointing, and Pete sighed. He put a bit of soup, some disgusting mushroom concoction that Ray’s mother insisted he enjoyed--and, having known him for much longer than Pete, was correct about his enjoying--on a spoon.

“Open up,” Pete said with false cheer. Even at seventeen, he was an old pro at projecting false emotion, and he sometimes suspected that the Long Walk had ruined emotion for him entirely, as he was only capable of truly feeling anything in the moment, as it were, when he was with Ray. Otherwise, he felt nothing but fake.

Ray seemed to have lost himself in his mind again, and Pete was sorely tempted to knock on his skull and ask if there was anybody home, but he had a spoon in his hand. “Would you like me to make airplane noises?” he asked politely. “Or would you prefer a choo-choo train?”

Ray smiled at that, simple as anything, and it felt familiar—like home—even though Ray was not one for smiling at all, especially now.

Pete felt a swell of pride in his chest, because he knew that he was the only person Ray bestowed his smiles upon. Perhaps it was because Pete was just that clever and charming, but Pete doubted it, and instead thought that it was more likely that Ray simply loved him, and thus found him clever and charming even when others would not. It made sense. Pete would love himself too, if he were effectively catatonic and took it upon himself to care for him and believed that he was not dead inside at all.

Ray’s smile made Pete think of all those times he wanted to kiss him during the Long Walk and afterwards. He would have been willing to kiss him after they won, even in front of the cameras, spur of the moment, but Ray had unfortunately entered the state that he was in too soon for something like that to happen.

Maybe that was for the best, Pete thought wistfully, though he would never actually convince himself of that. Even if the Major had decided to shoot them after all for the cardinal sin of homosexuality, it would have been worth it.

Pete had started wanting to kiss Ray at some nebulous point on the Long Walk, and simply had never stopped.

Ray was handsome, especially after he got some more meat on his bones and his beard shaved, though he was admittedly slightly less attractive when checked out from reality, unlike Pete, who was checked in so completely that he knew for a fact he would have blown his brains out the day after the Long Walk ended had he won alone, but Pete couldn’t help but want him.

At their nice kitchen table, Ray’s smile faded, though he met Pete’s eyes and was, for a time, clearly checked in to the same miserable reality as well, made bearable only by Pete’s charming, clever, familiar presence.

Ray opened his mouth, and allowed Pete to feed him. He did not even look away from Pete to check that the spoon wasn’t going to hit him in the chin or nose, as it had a few times at the beginning when Pete’s hands were always shaking. In response to Ray's trust, Pete felt a deep and almost overwhelming feeling of love.

Pete had said, at first, that there were no musketeers in situations like the Long Walk. Ray had proved him wrong. There was something about him, a quiet determination, a sincere kindness, a red string tied around his fingers connecting him to Pete, that made it so that at some point he became Pete’s reason for existence. It was why he saved Ray over and over again, and why he was still devoted to him after the Walk, even at the beginning there when it was a little like lugging around a corpse.

Pete had said, before he realized that what he most wanted was to walk away his scar, that there was no particularly special reason he was on the Walk, nothing like a sick loved one to care for. He was glad for that, back then, glad that he would not leave anyone who truly needed him behind.

But after the Walk, in an unfamiliar world that simply didn’t understand, he was bound to take care of a boy perhaps more broken than he was for the rest of his life, and it was fine by him.

Ray trusted him, Ray smiled at him and only at him, Ray showed signs of life with him and Pete showed signs of life with Ray, signs that he was more than just a puppet pulling his own strings with limited skill. They loved each other, and were maybe in love. Pete certainly was, because there was no one else in the known universe who he could fall in love with.

And besides, they had time. It was a crazy thought, but they did. They had time to get better, time for Ray to come back to life, because he was already coming back to life right before Pete’s eyes. No one else would believe it, because they didn’t see it, but Pete did.

Pete did.

He wiped away some soup from Ray’s chin. Pete watched Ray’s eyes drift to his lips, and the look of fond longing on Ray’s face, and he basked in his presence.

“I’ll wait for you,” Pete said, catching the moment before Ray slipped away again. “If you love me as much as I love you, or even half as much, I'll be happy to wait for you. I know that, in the end, we didn’t have a choice but to end up together, because who else was there? But I still love you. It’s just a fact.” Tears sprang to his eyes, and he attempted to blink them away and only succeeded in making them fall.

He was tired. He couldn’t help it. He was tired because of the nightmares and how they never went away, how every step he took made him relive his worst experiences, how he still expected to see blood and brain matter on the road, how he always kept a brisk pace because the Long Walk had become a part of him, how he wept like a child when he saw roadkill in the street, thinking of the boys he had never meant to bond with.

He was even tired because of Ray, because there was no way not to be tired when caring for someone who could not care for himself, but the difference between Ray and all the other brutal reminders of the Walk was that he never got tired _of_ Ray, though for all intents and purposes he should have gotten tired of Ray during the first six months, when it truly looked as though he was essentially comatose and Pete did almost everything for him with only minimal help from Ray’s mother, who could have just as easily and probably more competently cared for him, but Pete knew that without him Ray would become a lost cause.

Without the reminder of humanity, of what he had found on the Walk instead of what he had lost, including his epic romance with a pretty girl who was more like a fairy princess, nonexistent, he would be thrown away, perhaps into an institution, and there would be no getting better. Not when most everyone seemed to believe that Pete was near-delusional when he insisted that Ray would. But Ray did. Slowly but surely. And maybe they would be old before Ray was well enough to change his own clothes, but they had a chance to get old, and it was something.

It was months after that night when Pete confessed his love, though he only realized that that was what it was days after the fact, that Ray spoke for the first time, and Pete was so surprised that he dropped the spoonful of soup that was halfway to Ray’s lips, though he had seen it coming, Ray’s return to speech, or that was what he told himself as he grew accustomed to the muteness.

“I love you too,” Ray had said, and after Pete dropped the spoon, he said, “even though you’ve made a mess.”

Pete smiled.

They didn’t kiss that night, or the next. That took some more time, and finally being together, getting each other off like Pete had pretended to joke about on the Walk, that took even longer, but they did. Eventually.

To Pete, kissing Ray—who had by that point started speaking whole words even to his mother, who wept and held him and finally believed Pete when he said that Ray was talking again—felt like both surrender and celebration.

Surrender because it was an admission that they would never be apart and it would always be because of the Long Walk, an admission that they were broken because they were only whole when they were together. Celebration because it was an admission that they loved each other and had healed enough, just enough, that Ray could initiate a kiss and Pete could finally kiss back without guilt, without anything but want, sitting together in the backyard, still and quiet, resting, and it only took ten years.

Ten years taught Pete that they had been very young when they were damaged beyond repair, and very young when they decided that it wasn’t the end, because they were somehow still alive and, more importantly, they were together.

They still didn’t know how they may have ended up, who they may have fallen in love with, had they never made the decision to go on the Long Walk. Perhaps Ray would’ve ended up with Jan, such a nice girl, and Pete, well, maybe he would’ve sworn off love entirely like he thought he’d done when he went on the Walk.

But they would never know, and they didn't care, because, as Ray said, “However I feel about the Walk, if I regret it or not...it doesn’t matter, because what happened is what happened, and I don’t regret you. I'm happy we met, and damn the circumstances.”

Pete had nothing to say to that, because it was perfect.

So, at closer to thirty to twenty years old, they kissed, and that was perfect too, and Pete said, having a revelation he’d had many times before but never been able to believe, “It’s been quite some time, and we’re still young, in the grand scheme of things. Ray, have you realized? We’re going to get the chance to grow old together.”

Ray smiled. He said, “Isn’t that something?”


End file.
